Plato and the Whale

“Moby Dick is not written as cryptography but as mystery.  The agitations of voice, the playfulness through which symbols emerge and then dissolve, the mixtures of incantatory, Biblical, polite, and vernacular language in this and other American books— these are what demand our attention altogether more than do ideas or themes extracted by critics in the interest of tidying up what is mysterious or confused.”  — Richard Poirier, A World Elsewhere, p. 36

“Skepticism of this kind [the authors' regarding the symbolist tendencies of their central characters], however, need not and does not modify the grandeurs of description in which Melville and Lawrence like to indulge.  The admiration of the writers in both cases goes not to the possible accuracy of a symbolist perspective, but only to the heroic nobility of incentive behind it, its creative responsiveness to the things of this world.” – p. 43

Elsewhere, Poirier says that in the works he is discussing, the reader must ’submit to a discipline, imposed by the difficulties in the writing, that will develop in us a consciousness rarely called forth…,’ and that, ‘in Emerson’s view, writing is valuable for the stimulations offered locally, by particular moments of the reading experience, and not for any retrospective consideration of the whole.’

After watching Phillip Hoare’s BBC documentary, The Hunt for Moby-Dick, I wanted to read the book, and after reading Poirier, I actually took it down and began to do so.  It’s been slow going, but not because of any difficulty in maintaining interest, really.  I even found fascinating, for reasons I’ll get to in a moment, the dreaded ‘Cetology’ chapter, which two friends had warned me was the First Test of Commitment.  No, I’ve been reading it slowly simply because there’s no rush.  Which is new to me.  I’m normally eager to get through a book so I can move on to the next one, or I’m worried that I’ll forget some crucial image or idea and something important will be lost on me in the latter sections of a book.  Proust may have been a remedy for that— it is impossible to remember it all, so you remember what you remember and forget what you forget, and its length seems to be intended to bring about that necessarily cherry-picked memory.  But I think Phillip Roth’s recent comment, that if you take more than two weeks you haven’t really read the novel, is illuminating here, because it strikes me as particularly inadequate.  In most books, there are pivotal scenes supported by groundwork: character background, establishment shots, tension-building, etc.  There is a lot of padding, necessary or not, and it can obscure the significant passages, images, and events, such that if you take more than two weeks you will probably have forgotten something crucial and had something unimportant emphasized by the recession of what surrounds it.  Moby Dick seems different.  That’s not to say Melville doesn’t engage in groundwork— the first sentence is famous, after all— but I feel as if I can wander in Moby Dick, that Melville isn’t trying to direct which moments will provide that ‘local stimulation,’ and is willing to let just about any provide it.  There isn’t the imperative to get it all in quickly, so the stimuli combine to the full effect.  (And on top of that, if you are reading for a culminating effect, you’ve several hundred pages of meticulous anti-climax to get through first.) I’ll read a few chapters, then not pick it up for a day or two, but I still find myself mulling over certain passages and scenes, particular images or phrases.

Filed under: Melville, Poirier, Writing

A Working Definition: On Roubaud and Poirier

I suspect my fascination with etymologies is rooted in the two semesters of Latin I took in high school.  I don’t remember a lick of it, but I have remembered how to break words down and root out the bits that can (maybe) tell you something on their own, which might get you by if you find yourself in a jam (the jam, at the time, being standardized tests).  I am by no means a linguist; I’ve no formal experience with the inheritances of words.  They’re a playground, a rabbit hole.  I admittedly enjoy how irresponsibly I follow their transformations, considering how the parts of a word have made up that word, and how they mislead, how easily a word’s present form can overwrite its past and still arrive at the same understanding for all the wrong reasons, and how then each root word leads you to suspect it is the root of another.  Suffuse: suf-, alternate of sub-, meaning under, beneath, up to; but ‘fuse.’  I think: parallel to infusion, but, while infuse has pleasant connotations, suffuse casts a glance towards submission, willing or unwilling.  It walks a fine line between terror and bliss, between a hot shower after a hard day and waterboarding.  Of course, this is trumping things up quite a bit, akin to exploring the significance of two plus two equalling four by means of numerology.  ‘Suffuse’ means, simply, ‘to pour liquid over a surface,’ though pour is misleading.  One Established Dictionary says ‘overspread,’ instead of pour, even as it says the root Latin word is ‘to pour.’  (Unexpectedly, ‘fountain’ has nothing to do with fundere, the Latin root.)  Or: one would expect ’sect’ to follow from the root ‘to cut.’  A sect, one could assume, is a small group separated from— by an incision, a de-cision— but still part of a larger group.  But ’sect’ comes from ’secta’ for ‘following.’

‘Do your work, and I shall know you,’ [Emerson] says in ‘Self-Reliance’.  ‘Work’ is a way to confront the essential facts of existence and to discover in doing so the power of human desire which turns facts into mythologies and mythologies into facts.  – Richard Poirier, The Renewal of Literature, p. 94

Perhaps the most interesting aspect, the thing that keeps me going through Roubaud’s not always fun to read The Great Fire of London, is the dissonance of reading in the present tense.  We often consider grammatical tense and the effect it has on what is being narrated.  But rarely do we consider the tense of the activity of writing, except in such rare circumstances when it becomes so problematic, by the author’s intention or not, that we cannot help but notice it.  There is a bifurcation between experiencing self and writing self.  How an author handles such a dilemma, in an individual work or in their general method, I find to be one of the most interesting moves an author can make (can, because many do not).

Filed under: Poirier, Roubaud, Writing

“Seek? More than that: create.”

Daily, I attach less value to the intellect. Daily, I realize more clearly that only away from it can the writer repossess something of our past impressions, that is attain to something of himself and to the one subject-matter of art. … Compared with the past, the intimate essence of ourselves, the truths of the intellect seem quite unreal. … But it is to the intellect we must look all the same to establish the inferiority of the intellect. The intellect may not deserve the supreme accolade, but it alone is capable of bestowing it. It may hold only second place in the hierarchy of virtues but only it is capable of proclaiming that instinct has to occupy the first.
-Preface to Contre Sainte-Beuve (pp. 1, 7, 8), Marcel Proust

But in art there are no initiators or precursors (at least in the scientific sense). Everything is in the individual, each individual starts the artistic or literary endeavour over again, on his own account; the works of his predecessors do not constitute, unlike in science, an acquired truth from which he who follows after may profit. A writer of genius today has everything to do. He is not much further advanced than Homer.
-’The Method of Saint-Beuve’ (p. 11)

If we want to try and understand this self, it is deep inside us, by trying to recreate it within us, that we may succeed. … It is a truth every bit of which we have to create…
- (p. 12)

… what one gives to the public is what one has written when alone, for oneself, it is very much the work of one’s self… And not having seen the gulf which separates the writer from the society man, not having understood that the writer’s self shows itself only in his books, that he only shows society men… a society man like themselves, [Sainte-Beuve] was to launch that famous method which… consists, in order to understand a poet or writer, in questioning avidly those who knew him,… who may be able to tell us how he behaved in the matter of women, etc., that is, on all those very points where the poet’s true self is not involved.
- (pp. 15, 16)

If we follow the guidelines given in this preliminary work, a puzzling combination of fiction and criticism, the first fitful attempts at a style which would eventually come to be the style of Proust’s epic, we are directed in how to approach the narrator(s), both the embryonic form it takes in Contre Sainte-Beuve and its full-fledged form in A la recherche... Even here, in a piece which is almost automatically assumed autobiographical, we cannot call our narrator Marcel Proust.

Filed under: Beckett, Proust, Ranciére, Writing

from “How is Literature Possible?”

Being now in the midst of the pre-term-paper research panic, it will probably be dead here for a little while, but stumbling into this essay by Blanchot fairly well made my afternoon. Here’s a rather large (and lightly edited) excerpt:

According to some, the mission of language is correctly to express thought, to make itself into its faithful interpreter, to submit t it as to a sovereign that it acknowledges. But for others expression is only the prosaic destiny of everyday languages; the true role of language is not to express but to communicate, nt to translate but t be; and it would be absurd to see in it only an intermediary, a miserable agent: it has a power unique to itself, which it is exactly the writer’s duty to discover or to restore. There, it seems, are the two families of thought, each completely foreign to the other. What could they possibly have in common?

We have seen that come struggled against language because they saw in it an imperfect means of expression and because they wished for language a complete perfection of intelligibility. To what does this ambition lead? To the invention of a language without commonplaces, a language without apparent ambiguity, in fact a language that no longer offers a common measure and is completely removed from comprehension. And we have also seen that others struggled against language that was considered a too-complete or over-perfect means of expression and consequently a nonliterary language and that, by their pitiless demand, their concern for an inaccessible purity, they ended up hunting down conventions, rules, genres, all the way to a total prohibition of literature, satisfied if they could make their secret perceptible outside f any literary form. But it must now be added that these consequences— rejection of language, rejection of literature— are not the only ones to which both parties yielded. It also necessarily happens that their enterprise against words, their desire not to take them into account in order to leave thought its empire whole, their obsessive fear of indifference, all provoke an extreme care for language whose consequence is verbalism. That is a significant fate, at once deplorable and fortunate. Whoever wants to be absent from words at every instant or to be present only to those that he reinvents is endlessly occupied with them so that, of all authors, those who most eagerly seek to avoid the reproach of verbalism are also exactly the ones that are most exposed to this reproach.

It is the same for those who through the marvels of asceticism have had the illusion of distancing themselves from all literature. For having wanted to rid themselves of conventions and of forms, in order to touch directly the secret world and the profound metaphysics that they meant to reveal, they finally contented themselves with using this world, this secret, this metaphysics as they would conventions and forms that they complacently exhibited and that constituted at once the visible framework and the foundation of their works. In other words, for this kind of writer metaphysics, religion, and emotions take the place of technique and language. They are a system of expression, a literary genre – in a word, literature.

Now we are ready to give an answer to the question, How is literature possible? It is actually through virtue of a double illusion— illusion of some who struggle against commonplaces; illusion of others who, renouncing literary conventions or, as we say, literature, cause it to be reborn in a form (metaphysics, religion, etc.) that is not its own. It is from this illusion and from the awareness of this illusion that Jean Paulhan [the author of the work under review in this essay], through a revolution that can be called Copernican, like that of Kant, proposes to draw the most precise and rigorous literary reign. Let us note how bold this revolution is at first sight, for finally it is a question of putting an end to the essential illusion that allows literature. It is a question of revealing to the writer that he gives birth to art only through a vain, blind struggle against it, that the works that he thought he wrenched from common, vulgar language exists thanks to the vulgarization of virgin language, through an excess of impurity and debasement. There is in this discovery enough to cause the silence of Rimbaud to fall on everyone. But just as for man the fact of knowing that the world is the projection of his mind does not destroy the world, but on the contrary assures knowledge of it, represents its limits and makes clear its meaning, so does the writer, if he knows that the more he struggles against commonplaces the more he is bound to them, or if he learns that he writes only with the help of what he detests, has the chance to see the extent of his power and the means of his authority more clearly. In any case, instead of being unknowingly ruled by words or indirectly governed by rules (for his refusal of rules causes him to depend on them), he will seek for mastery of them. Instead of submitting to commonplaces, he will be able to make them; and knowing that he cannot struggle against literature, that he could eschew conventions only to accept their constraints, he will receive the rules, not as artificial guidelines that point out the way to follow and the world to discover but as the means of his discovery and the law of his progress through the darkness where there is neither a way nor an outline.

(collected in Faux Pas, translated by Charlotte Mandell)

RSB has an introduction to the work under review in this essay, Jean Paulhan’s The Flowers of Tarbes.

Filed under: Blanchot, Quotes, Writing

—Used Language

I have been thinking lately about what, for lack of a better term, would be my ‘aesthetics’— what I think makes good art good art (or just what makes art art— that’s one I wish we’d talk about more: is only good art art?). Taking courses in ‘analytic aesthetics’ and ‘continental aesthetics’ back to back forces you to spend a lot of time circling those words. Reading Heidegger over and over again in an effort to actually follow the progression of thought, the evolution within the single work of his own vocabulary (the dizziness that sets in when you think that that goes on in forty more volumes before and after!), and then thinking about others I am having to read— Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Derrida— and my own reading outside of class— Proust, Josipovici, Blanchot— it is a rigorous tactility in the writing itself that snares me. I would be remiss to say that I think Heidegger is right, that his philosophy has it pinned down, but I nevertheless feel drawn to his language, his way of talking about it, as I do Derrida and Proust and Josipovici and Blanchot— almost irrespective of the actual thought being developed, I am entranced by the development. To coopt some of the language from Origin, it is writing that does not ‘use up’ language.

How is that, though? On the practical level, when I am reading or watching something, what is it that makes me say, or, how is it that I actually can say, “This does not ‘use up’ its medium”?

Filed under: Heidegger, Josipovici, Synecdoche, Writing

Blanchot’s Infinite

“One sometimes hears strange questions asked, like: ‘What are the tendencies of today’s literature?’ or: ‘Where is literature going?’ Surprising questions, but the most surprising thing is that if there is an answer, it is easy: literature is going toward itself, toward its essence, which is disappearance.”

If there is any change, one probably hears this question asked often, nowadays, not just sometimes. I am only beginning to read Blanchot— mostly from The Book to Come, but a few other essays as well— and I can’t help but feel there is something major with which I disagree. It is difficult to say, though, because there appears to be a difference between when one is reflecting on Blanchot after the fact, and when one is reading Blanchot. The surface of his prose, when pushed on by reading, changes. I noticed this consciously after Steve posted Jonathan Littell’s essay on ‘Reading’ and I went on to read Blanchot’s essay and, with my rudimentary French, attempted to pick my way through the original, always relying on the translations to clarify. I ended up reading both Lydia Davis’ and Anne Smock’s translations. There’s a peculiar aspect of Blanchot which Smock’s translation either engenders or captures, because it is not there in Davis’. Davis’ feels much more by the letter of the law, a fairly rigorous translation of the literal language— which is useful when attempting to read in the process of translating on the fly— but I couldn’t grasp what Blanchot was doing; the gears just wouldn’t line up. Smocks’ seems to balance against itself much more delicately. Where in the former the essay tends to come out a little more analytic, the latter feels almost poetic, the controlling ideas having a strange coherence despite their jagged edges and the lingering questions they prompt.

That strange incommensurability of ideas is what I find again when I try to reread ‘The Disappearance of Literature.’

Filed under: Blanchot, Josipovici, Writing

“An idealized scene. Space as reassurance.”

August 14th, 2008

My bed is my writing table. My floor is my desk. Right now, I am sitting on the floor, cross-legged and leaning forward onto the bed to write, glancing at the many stacks of books around me, the stacks which I am sorting through and into numerous piles: books which I need access to, books which I want access to, books which I do not need access to, books which will be perfectly fine sitting in a box in a room in a different country while I am away for the year, books which I do not by any means need but nevertheless want access to, etc. All these stacks give me an overwhelming desire to have a small house in the distance in which I may set up a regimen, eat simply, read regularly, write when I feel I must, ‘learn to be good’… I am tired of moving.

I paused just then to consider which direction I wanted to pursue: something I thought to write after reading the first few essays in Perec’s Species of Spaces, or this idyll of isolation with language (“Is the aleph, that place in Borges from which the entire world is visible simultaneously, anything other than an alphabet?”).

Filed under: Books, Perec, Vuillard, Writing

A Commady of Errors, who begat delays, who begat problems, who…

I have become addicted to television. Over the Christmas break, when I wasn’t focused squarely— well, more parallelogram-ly— on paper writing, I wanted some thoughtless entertainment, things where thinking is optional, probably beneficial but nevertheless not a necessity. I was raised on game shows, the classics, and mysteries, by my mother, who could tell you the plot of any single episode of the Andy Griffith Show within two lines of dialogue and was almost as quick with I Love Lucy. With her, I would watch two episodes each of the Golden Girls and Designing Women while I did homework after school, Matlock and Murder, She Wrote on sick days, the Gameshow Network when those weren’t on, and whatever was the most recent popular murder mystery during its weekly slot. CSI was the most prevalent before her death, having just begun its several spinoffs and thus having a healthy syndicated backlog to dominate those timeslots not taken up by new episodes.

During college, I never had a TV. There was an excessive fee to have it in the dorms, and I simply never felt like paying for it after having not had it for that year, and the internet has more than enough mind-numbing entertainment for all mediums. Once DVDs became prevalent, I would, via Netflix or friends, occasionally go on series binges. The era of Arrested Development was a golden age amongst my friends, each disc on endless repeat (both by choice and because the cheap DVD player’s remote was lost, so we had no option but to choose “Play All”). My roommates and I had an implicit pact, as so many roommates are now familiar with, to watch the entirety of Six Feet Under, start to finish, together. It took us about a year and a half. After sixty five hours, plus countless bottles of wine and smoke breaks that lasted anywhere from four minutes to time-to-pass-out, you realize that it is, actually, quite an accomplishment to have seen the whole show together, having been able to put squabbles and homework aside so we could collectively get to know these fictional characters.

But this, this is not communal.

Filed under: Desperate Housewives, Marlowe, Toussaint, Writing

On Stevens’ “Add This to Rhetoric”

After a little over-indulgence on my part in wide-ranging and free-flowing rants for the past couple of posts, I’ll stick to a specific subject this time. This is one of my favorite poems by Wallace Stevens that, if not one of his most polished or succesfully ‘artful,’ is still an unbelievably powerful example of the man’s skill and intellect.

Add This to Rhetoric

It is posed and it is posed.
But in nature it merely grows.
Stones pose in the falling night;
And beggars dropping to sleep,
They pose themselves and their rags.
Shucks . . . lavender moonlight falls.
The buildings pose in the sky
And, as you paint, the clouds,
Grisaille, impearled, profound,
Pftt . . . In the way you speak
You arrange, the thing is posed,
What in nature merely grows.

To-morrow when the sun,
For all your images,
Comes up as the sun, bull fire,
Your images will have left
No shadow of themselves.
The poses of speech, of paint,
Of music—Her body lies
Worn out, her arm falls down,
Her fingers touch the ground.
Above her, to the left,
A brush of white, the obscure,
The moon without a shape,
A fringed eye in a crypt.
The sense creates the pose.
In this it moves and speaks.
This is the figure and not
An evading metaphor.

Add this. It is to add.

Though Harold Bloom is probably correct on both points when he says that “Add This to Rhetoric” is “a kind of footnote to the greater poem, ['The Poems of Our Climate'],” I still find it to be one of my favorite of Stevens’ poems. “The Poems of Our Climate” seems to belie the imperfection which it claim is “our paradise.” Admittedly, it does this beautifully; but that is part of why I prefer “Add This…,” which, instead, eschews beautiful, meditative images for simplistic ones that depict their subjects while demonstrating the poem’s premise, and which uses a grammar that demonstratively appropriates “…of Our Climate”’s paradisiac imperfection for its own purpose.

Filed under: Analysis, Poetry, Stevens, Writing , Add This to Rhetoric, Analysis, Poetry, Stevens, Writing

Kenneth Goldsmith

Kenneth Goldsmith is an itch I can’t scratch. That’s probably exactly what he wants to be, too. So I think I’ll try to figure out why he itches me and what about his work I need to unpack to scratch. I don’t remember where I encountered him first, whether it was UBUweb, PennSound, the Poetry Foundation’s blog, or heaven knows where else, but he’s an artist I haven’t been able to shake.

The issue, see, is that Goldsmith really does for language, for speaking, and for writing the exact same thing that Cage did with the audience in 4′33′, Eno did with a broken leg and a too-quiet record player, and Warhol did with Marilyn; and this is a very conscious effort for him. He’s reiterating what Duchamp did with the infamous urinal, Magritte did with “The Treachery of Images,” etc. The examples are countless. What I find conflicting about this is that Goldsmith isn’t really catching us up to what’s happening now. Thus, it annoys me that Goldsmith is considered so profoundly avant-garde, and not in the sense of the “anyone can do it” dilemma. Because yes, anybody can transcribe all the text of one day’s New York Times. Authenticity is not the issue, a tenet Goldsmith so conveniently founds his ideas on. He’s being blatantly unoriginal, not only in the fact that his works are direct requisitions of other texts, but that his ideas are nothing more than the past century’s theories of visual and musical art applied to text.

On the other hand, I think Goldsmith’s work is fascinating and necessary.

Filed under: Goldsmith, Poetry, Tangents, Writing , avant-garde, Goldsmith, Kenneth Goldsmith, Poetry